#478 - The Angry Chicken: “I Am Your Mind Muck”
08/24/2022
• Jocelyn • Hat
Tracking Link:
https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/
Future Topics / Saved Emails
Intro
Welcome to The Angry Chicken!
Thanks to the Patrons over at Patreon.com/TAC
TAC is supported by our epic Patrons. You can become a TAC Patron by going to Patreon.com/tac. Becoming a TAC patron gives you access to the TAC Discord Server.
News
Runestone-gate
- Patch 24.2 launches August 30, the final major BGs patch of 2022!
- New BGs season
- Battlegrounds gets its own progression track
- BG rewards removed from traditional Hearthstone rewards track
- BG weeklies are NO LONGER in the main rewards track - they are in the BG missions instead, which is separate and on top of the regular track
- Free and premium unlockables
- Emotes, Skins, Strikes, and “more”
- Legendary skins include voice lines and animated portraits
- Tiered strikes have unlockable animations, 5 total
- 2 tiers right away like normal strikes (damage, 15+ damage)
- 2 tiers available in the progression track
- 1 when you knock out a player
- 1 when you knock out a player and take 1st
- Progress earned by playing BGs ONLY
- “More free rewards than ever before”
- Designed to be completed with a reasonable amount of playtime throughout the Battlegrounds Season
- 20-60 XP per level
- 40 levels, 2000 XP in total
- Each BG win = 10 XP, each loss is 0 XP
- BG Missions
- Like traditional Hearthstone daily/weekly quests
- 3 missions per week
- Each worth 60 XP
- Unfinished Missions for the week are banked until the end of the season
- Missions do not reward Tavern Pass XP, but you will still earn XP like you currently do by playing BGs, and BGs can be used to complete Tavern Pass quests
- Will make adjustments in future Seasons if necessary
- Base emotes, advanced stats and hero early access go to all players now
- BUT… if you don’t buy the Season Pass, you only have 2 heroes to select
- This has lead to a conversation about the mode becoming Pay To Win, which we shall also now have
- OH SHIT IT'S ECON O'CLOCK
- CAVEAT DISCLAIMER - Anyone from Blizzard whose name you know did not make this call. The designers live with it and deal with it but did not make this decision. Nor did streamers, nor did players. Be nice to other humans on the internet.
- Second of all - we're going to discuss what we have been told at face value. I believe people but also I do not trust or make excuses for large faceless corporations. We're gonna thread the needle here so please listen to everything in context.
- The BG pass was purchasable with gold, but now is only available with real money
- BG players were able to get gold through quest completion and the main Hearthstone tavern pass levels because BG XP went to that rewards track
- With no other gold sink/BG players having a free way to get their full hero selection, players are upset
- There are no plans for BGs to use gold in any way
- Blizzard has committed to “hero and gameplay balance, so that regardless of which heroes you choose from, you know your chance for the crown is based primarily on player skill”
- The Season Pass will cost the same as the BG Perks used to
- The hero select thing is GAMEPLAY-IMPACTING and leads to a real legit competitive advantage - you can still win without it, but there's no way around this actually impacting game winrates over time if you care about that sort of thing
- Cosmetics weren't working so they had to pinch people who wanted to be competitive and also didn't want to pay. It's understandable why they would do it, but nobody likes being pinched
- Constructed players - this is your side mode, I get it, but think of it this way… what if you had to pay to mulligan the left and right most cards in your hand?
- PAUSE FOR EFFECT
- LET PEOPLE FEEL IT
- IT'S VISCERAL BUT OKAY LET'S PULL IT BACK
- But okay… what if you had to pay to mulligan the left and right most cards in your hand but they gave you all the cards for free all the time? Well every constructed player would probably take this deal in a heartbeat now…
- $15 three times a year is a very good value for what bgs offers. But it is still an expectation change - and it is objectively worse than what people had before for the last 2.5 years.
- But I believe the team needs more support and is hiring cool people… but I also don't trust large corporations and wouldn't blame anyone for being skeptical.
- Still, COSMETICS COULD NOT POSSIBLY HAVE BEEN WORKING. This is the only thing they have to sell that people care about. Maybe it'll change in the future, but so far all the people who have talked about quitting are the ones who were already not paying anything.
- I'm not going to buy this because I don't play enough. But it's a reasonable enough price point that I could see Drunk Hat impulse buying it on the ipad and then playing around with all the cool legendary strikes. Still, I don't care about my mmr so whatever the free track is more stuff anyway for me and more stuff for my wife who is a full f2p ipad gamer.
- Kilmarnok in our discord did some research:
- So we’ve had cosmetics for just over a year now (released in July 2021) and we have:
- 179 alt hero skins for 84 heroes
- 18 alt bartenders
- 8 alt finishers - they’re called Strikes now ;)
- 7 alt boards
- 6 alt emotes
- Simply put… if this was working, they would never have incurred a bunch of bad press and paywalled their game if it was a money factory already.
- I don't trust corporations and don't take comments at face value when they're not coming from the business team that actually made the decision, but they would have to be both greedy AND stupid to stop something that is already working well in order to piss a bunch of people off in the name of making more money. It wouldn't make sense.
- The Season Pass is available for Runestones, “Hearthstone’s new virtual currency”
- During the transition period “for this first season”, real money transactions will still be an option for players
- Runestones will be replacing real money purchases for nearly every product in the Hearthstone shop
- With Runestones we’ll be able to offer additional smaller-scale items, such as the individual Battlegrounds Hero Skins offered in the shop with this patch
- Let’s talk about transaction fees! (With fictional numbers of course)
- If a payment vendor charges 0.50 plus a % on each transaction, there comes a point where you can no longer make money by accepting that form of payment
- This is why IRL stores usually have a minimum posted for CC transactions
- If you can buy $10 of a virtual currency and then do all your smaller purchases in app, then there’s only one transaction fee instead of many smaller ones
- Companies can offer smaller purchases without losing money
- Where this becomes shitty is when you have some items for 500 Runestones but bundles start at 400
- No product costs are changing with this conversion—all prices are staying the same, just converted to Runestones (100 Runestones = $1.00USD)
- Bundles can suck
- They put an additional step between you and your money so it becomes harder to tell how much things cost
- There are often leftover amounts of currency, but not enough to buy something, keeps you in a cycle of buying more than you need and feeling like you need to buy more
- Heroes of the Storm did this and it was indeed predatory, hard to imagine that the same company will have a different implementation
- Many other companies do this as well, and none of them are good
- We don’t have any info on the size of bundles or the cost of items (other than things we already know are sold in store for real money like a card pack) so it’s hard to judge
- YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO EARN RUNESTONES, they are real money only
- There's not very much of a net positive here other than the potential to buy smaller items and also the potential for them to proactively dodge lootbox laws
- “We want Battlegrounds to be played and loved for years to come. This change will allow us to continue to support and make content for the growing Battlegrounds community. “
- Seems like they needed to monetize it to continue to support it, so likely that cosmetics weren’t selling well enough
Links
Cool things that got lost in the Runestone-gate Convo… At least they did it to themselves this time!
- The Dark Flight is attempting to remove magic in an alternate Azeroth timeline and we have to work with Nozdormu to restore the true timeline
- Anime-inspired
- Theme is for the BG Season Pass, heroes and minions added this patch follow the Murder at Castle Nathria theme
- Lasts for the duration of the season
- Designed to make each lobby different
- Start of turn 4, you’re offered a choice of three
- Quest and reward pairings are RANDOM AND DYNAMIC
- 13 quests total, 24 rewards (or thereabouts)
- Certain Quests and Rewards are restricted from being offered to specific Heroes or lobbies, to avoid extreme situations
- Quests and rewards have different offering rates
- Difficulty of completion depends on the reward they are paired with
- Better rewards = harder version of the quest
- Also small adjustments based on your hero’s armor tier (slightly harder for heroes with less Armor, slightly easier for heroes with more Armor)
- Some quests will be adjusted based on the available minion pool
- Complete the challenge, get the reward for the rest of the game
- Check progress by hovering over your hero
- When complete, your bonus will show to the left of your hero, where your buddy meter was
- Heads up, Dom C and Mitchell L guested on the HSBG podcast with EducatedCollins and ShadyBunny and it was really rad. They revealed a bunch of stuff and talked for a while about the gmode and expansion etc
- Quests
- Rewards (examples, there are lots more)
- Whodunit?: Passive. At the start of the game, choose one of two quests
- This does not replace your turn 4 choice, you get two quests!
- Detective for Hire: 0 Gold. Look at 2 minions. Guess which one your next opponent had last combat for a coin.
- There is some AI at play that is meant to make the choice challenging, so the scoreboard isn’t an automatic giveaway
- T4, 4 / 5
- At the end of your turn, steal the highest Tier minion from Bob’s tavern
- Joce’s note: not sure if this goes into hand or if you need board space
- T6, 6 / 6
- After you play a minion with no minion type, give three friendly minions of different types +2/+2 (i.e play a jug)
Links
Outro
Patreon Thanks
TAC is supported by our epic Patrons. You can become a TAC Patron by going to Patreon.com/tac. Becoming a TAC patron gives you access to the TAC Discord as well as other perks!
Thanks to our Patreon producers Dustin C!
The back catalogue of TAC can be found over on TheAngryChicken.com. Follow the show on Twitter @TACpodcast!
Catch the live show Monday nights at 8:00pm Eastern on Twitch.tv/joceplays.
Personal Stuff
Joce where can you be found?
Follow Jocelyn @JocePlays
The Gamers’ Inn
Hat stuff
http://twitter.com/RidiculousHat
Coin Concede, Vicious Syndicate
